PREFACE
This book will not change everything you know about Web design and
development. Neither will it revolutionize your workflow or your tools. But
hopefully it will challenge you to think a bit differently about how you
approach design problems and how to meaningfully solve them in real
life.
Smashing Book #4 is a practical book for professional designers and Web
developers. It doesn’t discuss flat design or skeuomorphism, and it isn’t
concerned with visual styles or trends.
With New Perspectives on Web Design, we want to explore handy
techniques and smart strategies derived from actual projects. Covering
both technical and design aspects of Web design, this book provides
insights into scalable front-end architecture, obscure back-end tricks,
responsible responsive Web design and performance optimization, but also
adaptive interfaces, Web typography, content strategy, customer support,
the creative process, and the psychology of human behavior on the Web.
We can’t foresee what is coming up next. But we can look closely at
the state of the art today, and keep improving our workflow with small,
gradual enhancements—learning from our colleagues and from our own
experiences. And this is exactly why this book exists—to keep up with,
enrich and improve the wonderful, flexible, unpredictable Web that has
become an integral part of our lives over all these years.